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EVENTS

The Big Bang… or Smush, Maybe…

PZ reports on a really cool new gadget, full of sciency goodness. Fast on the heels of that Hadron thingie that had us all excited yesterday, but didn’t end the world after all, comes the Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute’s “Giant Animal Smasher”.

The GAS is a 25 mile tube buried ten feet below the surface, and accelerates the animals at rates up to 6,000 meters per second using a series of pulleys, levers and fusion reactors.

Cool.

Of course, there are accusations of Physics Envy:

One scientist at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, said, “Biologists are just jealous of all the attention the LHC has been getting. Since they aren’t real scientists, they had to come up with this atrocity. Next thing you know the psychologists will build a brain smasher to compete.”

The bottom line is, scientists like to play God.

Or, perhaps, since we created Him in our own image, it is god that likes to play scientist.

My own take on the matter…. (and I think it is just smashing, if I say so myself)

I picture Young God, on some sort of a dare,‘Cos all of the older, cool gods are all there,Saying “what if I take all the stuff there was everAnd, hard as I can, smash it all up together?”The other gods, laughingly, dare Him to try,And because he’s an insecure kind of a guy,He does it–he wants to be one of The Gang:And that is what happened “before the Big Bang.”

Comments

There is a hypothesis that the deity of the J document — one of the strands of tradition which was incorporated into what is now the Old Testament — was originally pictured as a genie-like figure, a boy about twelve years old.

I did not know that; very cool. The closest think I can get to it is a Roy Zimmerman song, “What if”, from Comic Sutra (http://www.royzimmerman.com/lyrics/sutra_whatif.html)What if God, in God’s own world, is an underachiever?Or a beautiful and highly intelligent, faithful, kind and loving golden retriever?